Last modified: 2012-09-24 15:20:57 UTC
It is horrible for non-technical-users of MediaWiki wikis to use Bugzilla for several reasons: * Interface: ** Nothing localized ** Totally different markup ** You can't even correct spelling mistakes in your posts * Intransparency: ** Pretty well hidden: You need a handbook for understanding how to find what you are looking for or if you like to look behind the scenes ** No profile pages/ no signature: You are talking to e-Mail addresses and don't know how they are related to MediaWiki (developer, community, both, hacker, ...) My first thoughts when I saw this page: * Am I right here? Looks like a fake-wikimedia site. Why this "beetle" with a speech bubble? This must be a place that isn't designed for me but for the MediaWiki developers. But there is an issue... well let's e-Mail a dev instead. Then reading "How to Report Bugs Effectively", which is linked from the main page... ( http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html ) It starts from the perspective of the developer. This is quite discouraging. Instead of this polemic page, there should be a short list, preferably shown when starting a new bug report, what to include. It is funny to read yes, but is not straightforward. I hope you can comprehend some of my points and something will be improved in this direction. A first step could be labeling this site "issue tracker" because bug is not part of default English lessons, while "issue" is. Issue would also cover feature requests.
Yay, let's reinvent the wheel. We all know how well that goes down.
Are you talking about code review?
Bugzilla is a useful tool and very handy from a developers point of view. The issues you note are: (1) it's not easy for a non technical user to report bug (2) interface should be localized The solution isn't especially to forbid developers to use a decent tool. It could also to have entry. For exemple, for some of my C# softwares, I prepared a wizard using bugzproxy - http://oss.dbc.dk/bugzproxy/ - you can see a screenshot on http://www.dereckson.be/Blog/images/EspaceWin/AddBugWizardEWOSP.png There are a lot of alternative solutions. We could prepare a localized bug wizard similar to the Commons upload wizard. Or we could educate users to more easily use Bugzilla (which is a useful skill: they will be able to report bugs related to other open source projects too). But replace a tool by another when you've 40k bugs inside and dozens of tools linked to it is pure suicide (or a big time waster). (By the way I must confess I would love to be able to edit my comments, but it's not a blocker, as you can always add a new comment if it's important to fix it.) [ RESO WONTFIX ]
(speaking of being able to edit comment...) The solution isn't especially to forbid developers to use a decent tool. It could also to have an extra entry point to allow users to report bugs a more friendly way.
Uh, removing Bugzilla sure is an overkill, but Rainer raises some good points. Maybe the main page could be made more useful, and the comments less barf-inducing for non-devs? I've experienced these issues first-hand when trying to get people on pl.wiki to just report issues in Bugzilla themselves; even English-speaking users seem unwilling to touch it and prefer hoping somebody will relay their messages from the Village Pump.
Related bugs (one of which this bug could likely be marked a duplicate of): * bug 27852: Wikimedia wikis need better issue reporting system * bug 27001: MW Bugzilla integration extension * bug 27421: Write and implement bug reporting wizard
(In reply to comment #5) > Maybe the main page could be made more useful, and the comments less > barf-inducing for non-devs? > > I've experienced these issues first-hand when trying to get people on pl.wiki > to just report issues in Bugzilla themselves; even English-speaking users seem > unwilling to touch it and prefer hoping somebody will relay their messages from > the Village Pump. Right. This is bug 38990 ("Bugzilla products could use a re-examination"). And the related RFC: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Bugzilla_taxonomy>. The entire bug workflow needs some love. This just came up recently on wikitech-l. Any help would be appreciated. :-)
Bugzilla is open source and has Add-Ons. Shouldn't it be fairly doable to replace the comments system with a per-bug MediaWiki page transcluded within the Bugzilla output? (In my ignorance I'm assuming that this wouldn't break other Bugzilla things...)
Bug 38990 is about (In reply to comment #5) > I've experienced these issues first-hand when trying to get people on pl.wiki > to just report issues in Bugzilla themselves; even English-speaking users seem > unwilling to touch it and prefer hoping somebody will relay their messages from > the Village Pump. A good solution could be to educate communities to report bugs and eensure each big wiki have at least one relay people. In this case, what is important is the relay works and doesn't let messages unforwarded. (In reply to comment #7) > Right. This is bug 38990 ("Bugzilla products could use a re-examination"). And > the related RFC: > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Bugzilla_taxonomy>. This bug is about a reorganization of the product categories, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/describecomponents.cgi
(In reply to comment #3) > (1) it's not easy for a non technical user to report bug If you're only after reporting, we should investigate using the guided bug entry form. See bug 36762. > (2) interface should be localized Bugzilla has infrastructure for that: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:L10n:Guide
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3AHelp_desk&diff=78974710&oldid=78971117 "Unfortunatly, I have never used bugzilla earlier. I tried and failed. It requires great efforts from my side with translation and merely understanding, so I doubt in the success of my future attempts. =[ Maybe, someone else will report?"
Thank you to have reported it yourself in bug 40472.
